"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

pizen:namatad: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSevenBasicPlotsget back to me when you read/see a story which isnt a mash up of these

/WOOT the bad guy is a girl!! how a original! or a machine. or it was all a dream./ROFL

Oh great, a TV Tropes link. So much for today's productivity.

Would be more interesting if every other line in the article wasn't "BIOSHOCK INFINITE BIOSHOCK INFINITE BIOSHOCK INFINITE BIOSHOCK INFINITE BIOSHOCK INFINITE BIOSHOCK INFINITE OMFG BIOSHOCK INFINITE !!!!"

FTFA: the only real difference between the films is that in Up, the old man goes on a bunch of zany jungle adventures with a fat kid and a talking dog, whereas in Above Then Beyond, the old lady dies and it's revealed to be a dream she had.

So in other words, Up shares the same premise -- a floating house -- and the other 98% of the story is different. Plus, the emotional center of Up is the relationship between the old man and his wife, and his unfulfilled promise to her. Yeah, maybe somebody at Pixar did see Above Then Beyond and and the visual image sparked the idea -- but to say that it's a ripoff makes as much sense as saying that Cars ripped off Bullitt.

"It's not about what it's about, it's about how it's about it" -- Roger Ebert.

FTFA: the only real difference between the films is that in Up, the old man goes on a bunch of zany jungle adventures with a fat kid and a talking dog, whereas in Above Then Beyond, the old lady dies and it's revealed to be a dream she had.

So in other words, Up shares the same premise -- a floating house -- and the other 98% of the story is different. Plus, the emotional center of Up is the relationship between the old man and his wife, and his unfulfilled promise to her. Yeah, maybe somebody at Pixar did see Above Then Beyond and and the visual image sparked the idea -- but to say that it's a ripoff makes as much sense as saying that Cars ripped off Bullitt.

"It's not about what it's about, it's about how it's about it" -- Roger Ebert.

Not a classic by any means but The Island starring Obi-Wan and Black Widow was a shameless ripoff of Parts: The Clonus Horror, an MST3K favorite. So much to the point that there was a lawsuit. Spielberg was involved though so I doubt the Parts people won.

"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

doglover:Hunger Games is sooooooo the crappy version of Battle Royale.

Not sure if trolling, but I saw Battle Royale, and I've seen bits and pieces of Hunger Games. HG has a much more extensive backstory and characterization. There's much more material about the world that the characters live in -- for example, America being transformed into a resource-extraction state with widening wealth and income disparity -- that isn't there in BR, which plays out like a high school drama. Certainly they're conceptually similar -- the core of HG being, in fact, a battle royale -- and it looks like HG borrowed some details, but Battle Royale is a much simpler story.

Arkanaut:Not sure if trolling, but I saw Battle Royale, and I've seen bits and pieces of Hunger Games. HG has a much more extensive backstory and characterization. There's much more material about the world that the characters live in -- for example, America being transformed into a resource-extraction state with widening wealth and income disparity -- that isn't there in BR, which plays out like a high school drama. Certainly they're conceptually similar -- the core of HG being, in fact, a battle royale -- and it looks like HG borrowed some details, but Battle Royale is a much simpler story.

But it's a foreign film, which automatically makes it better. For some reason.

I always chuckle when I see people claiming that Avatar is a rip-off of Dances With Wolves, or Pocahontas, or Ferngully.

It's clearly a rip-off of Dune. Think about it (for once): Foreign guy arrives on dangerous new world; has an accident that throws him in with the natives; he is accepted into their culture after proving his worth; falls in love with one of their females; joins them in their freedom fight; conjures up wild beasts to aid in the fight and is subsequently deified; drives off evil guys stealing their natural resources.

Doesn't sound like Dances With Wolves, or Pocahontas, or Ferngully anymore, hmm?

unlikely:Yes yes, and The Lion King is a ripoff of Hamlet and Star Wars is a ripoff of the Hidden Fortress, we're all very impressed.

When I hear someone cry "X is a ripoff of Y" what I generally hear is "Look how hip I am for liking this story before it was cool."

Somebody showed me a video a few months ago, they were very excited about it, and kept pointing out how it had been shown at TED, so that must mean that it had street cred...

Anyway, the video was about how everything is inspired by something else, even if it's unintentional. Then I proceeded to watch 10 minutes or so of footage from the Kill Bill movies, and then the original movies that they were inspired by. The problem with this approach is that Tarantino starts out from the beginningtelling you that he is trying to emulate a certain type of movie. Of COURSE it's going to have direct parallels to existing movies(And of course in this case they were all Japanese movies). It was really a stupid video when the guy states from the start that he is setting out to prove your thesis before you've even formed it yourself.

As for this list, it's stupid, they can't even keep straight what one thing or another is a "ripoff" of, sometimes the movie is a "ripoff", although that movie is based on a book(Hunger Games), or it's a comic book...

Why doesn't this Cracked shiat get vetted better?" They actually DO have some good lists from time to time, unfortunately, it's the dregs that show up here almost every time.

doglover:When the Japanese movie was re-released for American audiences, they included a cheeky reference in the trailer, which almost makes it sound like The Hunger Games was a remake:

Hunger Games is sooooooo the crappy version of Battle Royale.

Thank you. I can't believe that POS got 85% at Rotten Tomatoes. It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Sometime around when the games started and the team of four was gallivanting around, laughing and killing people, I just shook my head and became acutely aware that I was watching a movie. I was like "You morons realize that you're eventually going to have to kill each other, right? Could these shiatty actors at least pretend to show some complexity here?"

BR depicted a much more realistic response of a bunch of children being put in a survival horror situation. There were rebellions, refusals to participate, suicides, people peeing their pants, and extremely clumsy attempts to whack at other children with melee weapons. HG acts like a bunch of teenagers would suddenly become hardened, fearless ninjas because you trained them for three days. And there were no discussions of the injustice of making 12 year old girls fight 18 year old men.

What that movie needed was for one character to be incredulous in order to lampshade as the voice of the viewer in that ridiculous world.

So there you go. Every story you've ever read is encapsulated within a combination of these essential tropes.

Ever read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I can see man vs. the environment with an ambiguous ending, but I'd have trouble classifying it as any of the first 8. Really a lot of distopian novels have a similar quality, unless "the system" or "the world" qualifies as a nemesis.

Either way, it's not a ripoff of anything it's a spoof, so by definition, it has to appear to be like the movies that it is spoofing.

Actually, both are true. Airplane! was, indeed, a spoof of the 70s airline disaster movies. However, it *ALSO* was done so by essentially taking large portions of Zero Hour! and adding jokes; seriously, there are some exact dialog, scene-for-scene, and plot device copies between the two. So much so, that the only reason it was possible to do so without a slam-dunk lawsuit was that both were Paramount films.

Tommy Moo:Ever read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I can see man vs. the environment with an ambiguous ending, but I'd have trouble classifying it as any of the first 8. Really a lot of distopian novels have a similar quality, unless "the system" or "the world" qualifies as a nemesis.

What a terrible book.

Out of food? Find applesOut of water? Find a cistern.Exhausted? Find an underground shelter to rest.

There must not have been anything else written that year for it to win a Pulitzer prize.

Broktun:Tommy Moo: Ever read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I can see man vs. the environment with an ambiguous ending, but I'd have trouble classifying it as any of the first 8. Really a lot of distopian novels have a similar quality, unless "the system" or "the world" qualifies as a nemesis.

What a terrible book.

Out of food? Find applesOut of water? Find a cistern.Exhausted? Find an underground shelter to rest.

There must not have been anything else written that year for it to win a Pulitzer prize.

The only thing about this book I enjoyed was the concept of drinking the last coke a cola in the world.

I only drink a coke about 1x a year and when I do, I go through the mental process of imagining its the last one ever. Don't know why, but it makes it taste damn good.

Broktun:Tommy Moo: Ever read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I can see man vs. the environment with an ambiguous ending, but I'd have trouble classifying it as any of the first 8. Really a lot of distopian novels have a similar quality, unless "the system" or "the world" qualifies as a nemesis.

What a terrible book.

Out of food? Find applesOut of water? Find a cistern.Exhausted? Find an underground shelter to rest.

There must not have been anything else written that year for it to win a Pulitzer prize.

Well, if you just look at the plot, there's not a whole lot going on. There's a lot of value in the relationship between the father and the boy, so the novel works as a piece on fatherhood. Where it really holds up well in my opinion is the language. It didn't matter what McCarthy was writing about; he just did such a masterful job of wordsmithing the world around him. It could have been about a father and son taking a trip to a grocery store and it would have been just as incredible of a book.

I mean... come on. Tell me this isn't one of the most moving, heart-stopping pieces of grief you've ever read:

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

So there you go. Every story you've ever read is encapsulated within a combination of these essential tropes.

Kind of vague and general, aren't they?

"Hey, that story has a guy doing stuff! That's obvious ripoff of Gilgamesh!"

Well, when you boil everything down to nuts and bolts, yes, you only have about 168 story combinations. Unless someone can think of some other categories that don't outright fit into any of the others, and then it would expand the selection a bit. But you start defining the stories with details, and they do become different. You can have a Romeo and Juliet story in a dystopian future, or hundreds of years ago in the arabian desert, or in old tyme England, and the writing style, characters, dialog, and solutions are going to change how the story gets from beginning to end. Strip all that away and you're still left with Boy Meets Girl vs Environment (society at large or the opposing families) and a unhappy ending.

Mugato:Arkanaut: Not sure if trolling, but I saw Battle Royale, and I've seen bits and pieces of Hunger Games. HG has a much more extensive backstory and characterization. There's much more material about the world that the characters live in -- for example, America being transformed into a resource-extraction state with widening wealth and income disparity -- that isn't there in BR, which plays out like a high school drama. Certainly they're conceptually similar -- the core of HG being, in fact, a battle royale -- and it looks like HG borrowed some details, but Battle Royale is a much simpler story.

But it's a foreign film, which automatically makes it better. For some reason.

We covered this is in my film classes years ago... The reason that foreign films seems to be so superior is probably the same thing people see in foreign countries. They don't bother to ship their dreck off for screening in America. Why would they? They ship out their best(For the most part), and keep the garbage at home. As a result, we get the better films, and people think that it means that ALL foreign films are better. Makes perfect sense, but skews everyone's perspective...

Mikey1969:Mugato: Arkanaut: Not sure if trolling, but I saw Battle Royale, and I've seen bits and pieces of Hunger Games. HG has a much more extensive backstory and characterization. There's much more material about the world that the characters live in -- for example, America being transformed into a resource-extraction state with widening wealth and income disparity -- that isn't there in BR, which plays out like a high school drama. Certainly they're conceptually similar -- the core of HG being, in fact, a battle royale -- and it looks like HG borrowed some details, but Battle Royale is a much simpler story.

But it's a foreign film, which automatically makes it better. For some reason.

We covered this is in my film classes years ago... The reason that foreign films seems to be so superior is probably the same thing people see in foreign countries. They don't bother to ship their dreck off for screening in America. Why would they? They ship out their best(For the most part), and keep the garbage at home. As a result, we get the better films, and people think that it means that ALL foreign films are better. Makes perfect sense, but skews everyone's perspective...

fark, you could write a book on that alone. different countries/cultures keeping their worst local while the blockbusters go universal. what was a flop in one country may be heralded as genius elsewhere. Jerry Lewsi was zany fun but he wasn't a frickin' comedic genius, for example.